Ok, so I have some (very little) sympathy for you. Debit cards only became popular somewhat recently and your brain just isn’t really designed to learn anything new anymore. But, lady, you’re fucking with my life. When I get in line at a drug store, grocery store, target, whatever, I want to get in and out as soon as possible. But you’re a middle-aged woman, this new, ridiculously complicated, technology is impossible to understand. A pin number? Wait, you swipe the card and… oh no that’s just crazy. So you don’t swipe your debit card and help us all get the fuck on with our lives, you dig deep down into that massive purse, find that pen and write a god damned check.
Here’s something that happened to my brother and i at Safeway the other day. It was 6:00 on a Thursday so the store was packed. Luckily for us, a lane opened up and we just had to go after this middle-aged woman. I had a bad feeling. First off, she had an astronomical amount of groceries (it turns out to be $450 worth). Clearly she gets out a ton. Ringing and bagging all these groceries took about 5 minutes. Then it was time to pay. She tried her credit card, but it was declined. At least she claims—I think she just didn’t actually swipe it correctly and it said swipe again, she interpreted this as it getting declined—. So then she gets out her checkbook. At this point I consider switching lines, but I had already put my groceries on the conveyor belt, so I decided against it. This woman writes a check, fucks it up, writes another one and records it in her checkbook. She then gives the check to the cashier who tries to process the check in a machine that works like it was made in 1972. Turns out she has a $250 limit on her checks, and since she had four hundred and fifty fucking dollars in groceries she couldn’t use the check. It took multiple explanations from the cashier before she finally understood. Then she takes out her Debit card and says “oh well I have this thing.” She swipes it, and reads the words aloud “enter your pin, ok.” She enters her pin. Transaction complete. This took 30 seconds. The whole ordeal took 30 minutes. Thankfully, I was pumped about the homemade Mac and Cheese I was about to make and it only took a little road rage to subdue my pissedoffness.
There’s so much technology out in the world now that allows so much convenience in our lives. And it’s your choice whether to use it or not. But here’s my problem: If I use my debit card at the grocery store, I benefit because the process goes faster for me and the people behind me benefit because they get out of the grocery store faster too. If the middle-aged woman doesn’t use the debit card, she is unaffected because she only knows this slow way of life, while everyone else behind her will have a worse experience because they have to wait for her sorry, wrinkly ass.
I read somewhere that as you get older and you experience more, time, relatively, becomes faster and faster. This means that when the woman writes the check it may feel like minutes to her, but it’s going to feel like hours for me, and for children, days. So middle-aged woman, I only have one question for you. Are you going to let the children go without their food for days? I didn’t think so. Learn to use a fucking debit card.